The Rape of Europa Read online

  Hungry for foreign currency, other Nazi leaders also secretly cashed in on this bonanza, but their dealings were only a drop in the bucket. In March 1938 Franz Hofmann, chairman of the confiscation committee, declared the museums to be “purified.” The fate of the remaining works awaited the Führer’s orders. Hitler had seen the deposits for himself in January. In June he signed a law freeing the government from all claims for compensation for the “safeguarded” works, one of the first official uses of the euphemism which was to become an international watchword in the next decade. His action opened the way to unrestrained commerce. Goebbels was pleased and wrote in his diary that he hoped to “make some money from this garbage.”45 A Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art was formed. On it sat the chief of Alfred Rosenberg’s art operations, Robert Scholz; Ziegler; photographer Heinrich Hoffmann; and, in an arrangement that makes modern insider-dealing scandals seem childish, Berlin art dealer Karl Haberstock, who had begun his career at the Paul Cassirer firm and had ties to all the major European dealers. To avoid any appearance of impropriety the commission members were supposed to refrain from selling. Four well-known dealers were appointed to take over the actual marketing of this extraordinary inventory: Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller, Bernhard Boehmer, and Hildebrand Gurlitt. All were men who had handled modern art for years. Möller had represented Nolde and Feininger; Boehmer was a friend of Barlach’s. Gurlitt had been fired from Zwichau for exhibiting modern artists, and Buchholz was the mentor of Curt Valentin, who had named his New York gallery in Buchholz’s honor and who would be present at the Lucerne auction.

  The international market had already been well primed for these sales, as such farsighted museum directors as Count Baudissin had begun deaccessioning “unacceptable” works soon after Hitler’s advent to power.46 The dealers were instructed to sell for foreign currency without “arousing positive evaluations” at home. Fortunately, the operation was managed by an enlightened lawyer and amateur art historian, Rolf Hetsch, who knew the true value of the contents of the warehouse. He set up a salesroom in Schloss Niederschonhausen, just outside Berlin. The four dealers could buy things for very little as long as they paid in foreign currency. Even Germans could buy if they had dollars, sterling, Swiss francs, or objects of interest to the Führer.47 A painter of modest means, Emanuel Fohn, who lived in Rome, heard of the sales in late 1938. Remembering Ziegler from student days at the Munich Academy, he rushed to consult him and was given Hetsch’s name. Hetsch agreed to accept works from Fohn’s collection of nineteenth-century German paintings in exchange for “degenerate” ones. Fohn took them back to Italy and promised to return these paintings someday to Germany. At his death the collection was indeed left to the Städtische Museum in Munich, the birthplace of his wife, Sofie.48

  Word of the trade soon went much farther afield. The director of the Basel Kunstmuseum, Georg Schmidt, persuaded his city fathers to give him SFr 50,000 to invest, declaring that it was their duty to save good art. He spent it well both at the Schloss and at the Lucerne auction. Curt Valentin, still a German citizen, was able to obtain from this source much of the inventory which established him as a major New York dealer, and continued to make frequent and risky trips to Berlin. Hetsch sold works for practically nothing, simply to get them out of the country. A postwar study lists more than twenty pages of objects distributed from the Nation-algalerie’s collections alone. Even a little sample of the prices paid makes unbelievable reading:

  M. Beckmann Southern Coast $20 to Buchholz

  M. Beckmann Portrait SFr 1 to Gurlitt

  W. Gilles 5 Watercolors $.20 each to Boehmer

  W. Kandinsky Ruhe $100 to Möller [now Guggenheim Museum, New York]

  E. Kirchner Strassenzene $160 to Buchholz [now MoMA, New York]

  P. Klee Das Vokaltuch der

  Sängerin Rosa Silber $300 to Buchholz

  Lehmbruck Kneeling Woman $10 to Buchholz49

  Needless to say, the anointed dealers often did rather better on the resales, which they did not always report to the Commission.

  In the fall of 1938 Exploitation Commission member and dealer Karl Haberstock suggested to Hitler and Goebbels that a public auction would increase these minimal revenues. He brought a Swiss crony and fellow Cassirer alumnus, Theodore Fischer, to look over the depositories. Together they chose the 126 works which would be sold in Lucerne on that sunny day the following June. It was none too soon. Despite all the trading activity, the Copernicusstrasse warehouse remained distressingly full. Franz Hofmann, fanatically desirous of carrying out Hitler’s purification policies to the letter, pushed to get rid of the remaining works, which he declared “unexploitable.” He suggested that they be “burned in a bonfire as a symbolic propaganda action” and offered to “deliver a suitably caustic funeral oration.”50 Shocked at the idea of such destruction, Hetsch and the dealers took away as much as they could. But Goebbels agreed to Hofmann’s plan, and on March 20, 1939, 1,004 paintings and sculptures and 3,825 drawings, watercolors, and graphics were burned as a practice exercise in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department’s headquarters just down the street. The works in Schloss Niederschonhausen were reprieved and gradually sold or traded away. The whole process of “purifying” the German art world, and its “final solution” in flames, eerily foreshadows the terrible events to come in the next six years.

  The German pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair, 1937 (Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann)

  II

  PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT

  The Nazi Collectors Organize;

  Austria Provides, Europe Hides

  To art professionals outside Germany the advent of Nazism and the bizarre goings-on of its art establishment were regarded at first as a passing phenomenon which would require some minor adjustments in international dealings. Even Alfred Barr, so upset by National Socialist ideas, planned to publish his exposés anonymously lest he alienate German museum officials who might later deny important loans to the Museum of Modern Art.

  In the great museums of Europe the schedule of exhibitions and exchanges seemingly went on as it always had. Despite German militarization of the Rhineland and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, planning for the 1937 World Exposition in Paris was not interrupted. The German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, was given one of the most prominent sites by the French, who had naughtily placed it directly opposite the Soviet pavilion, which was surmounted by two huge figures with hammer and sickle who appeared to be attacking the German building.

  Later in the year, just after the “Degenerate Art” show, there was particularly enthusiastic response to an International Hunting Exposition put on in Munich by Hermann Goering in his capacity as Chief Huntsman of the Reich. In hopes of easing rising diplomatic tensions, the British Ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, felt that his country should be represented along with the rest. Though they were late in getting organized, the British managed to produce mounted heads of game bagged by the King and Queen in their Dominions, a stuffed giant panda, and other colonial trophies, which won them first prize in the “Overseas” section. France sent foxhounds and splendidly dressed huntsmen but was edged out by Poland for the first “European” prize. The walls of the exhibition hall were filled with paintings and prints of hunting scenes contributed by every nation. Hitler came despite the fact, according to the British Ambassador, that “he hates all sport and deplores in principle the taking of animal life.” It was not all fun. The Ambassador had persuaded the new Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to send Lord Halifax, Lord President of the Council and a famous huntsman, to Munich to take part in the festivities. In the course of his stay Halifax was introduced to Hitler, Goebbels, von Neurath, and Goering, “in the hope that personal contact between a British statesman and the Nazi leaders, which Hitler was believed to seek … might lead to better understanding.”1 Henderson need not have bothered: two weeks earliér, Hitler had held the now famous meeting at which he ordered his generals, in a four-hour harangue, to pre
pare their forces for the implementation of his Lebensraum policies by 1938. Unaware of this, Halifax wrote that “the German Chancellor and others gave the impression that they were not likely to embark on adventures involving force.”2

  Until 1937 German collectors and museums were still lending generously to such shows as the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem. But by 1938 exhibition organizers outside Germany began to notice a certain reluctance to loan Old Masters on the part of German museums. A major Rembrandt show at the Rijksmuseum, intended to celebrate the Jubilee of the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, was threatened with cancellation when none of the planned German loans were forthcoming. The desperate director of the museum rushed to Berlin to plead with the Ministries of Culture and Propaganda and the Foreign Office but was turned down.

  Meanwhile, requests for loans from other countries had piled up unanswered at the German Foreign Office. Late in July the overwhelmed and confused official in charge of these matters asked for clarification of his government’s policy. He had received requests from Bern for an Altdorfer show, and from Milan for Leonardo drawings. Liege had asked for fifty-seven pictures with water themes by artists ranging from van der Weyden to van Gogh, including eight canvases which had now been declared “degenerate.” The Belgian Ambassador was pressing for an answer to a May request for twelve Memlings for Bruges. The beleaguered bureaucrat had been told by the Propaganda Ministry that the Führer had forbidden all such loans in a 1937 decree, but when he had made inquiries the Reichschancellery had said that the Führer had no objections to the Memling loan. With some indignation he declared that it would be helpful if the ministries could decide on a single policy. Goebbels and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal assistant, under pressure from museum officials who felt that these refusals would hurt Germany’s image, agreed to discuss the question with their chief again. He did not relent: exceptions were permissible only for urgent foreign policy reasons. Other nations should not be upset if Germany was reluctant to loan fragile and irreplaceable treasures. As an example of such a work Hitler cited the Discus Thrower, which, with Mussolini’s sanction, he had recently bought from Prince Lancelotti and imported from Italy. In the future the Führer would decide each case personally.

  Eight Memlings were finally allowed to go to Bruges, probably thanks to their religious themes, which Hitler disliked almost as much as modern art. In Bruges the Memlings, which included the magnificent Polyptych of the Calvary from the Cathedral of Lübeck, were shown alongside four lovely little panels representing angels playing musical instruments, lent by the Dutch dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Liege, Milan, and Bern were not so lucky, though in the case of Milan, Hitler hastened to state that no insult “to our Italian friends” was intended. No works of the first rank were to leave Germany before the outbreak of war, a restrictive policy that Intelligence professionals like to call an “indicator.”3

  Although permission was granted for a few modern works to be sent to San Francisco’s 1939 International Exposition, nothing went in the end, and official Germany was conspicuously absent from both San Francisco and the New York World’s Fair of that year. Its only representation was a splendid group of thirty-four Expressionist works sent to California by the refugee dealers Curt Valentin and Karl Nierendorf. Hitler did not care that these “degenerate” pieces were in the uncultured United States: his masterpieces were safe at home.

  The rest of the world, including future belligerents Italy, Japan, and the USSR, had blithely sent more than five hundred paintings and innumerable other objects to both events. A Belgian show was shipped ahead to Worcester. Mussolini upstaged them all by allowing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to cross the seas for the first time. She was accompanied by distinguished friends, among them Verrocchio’s David, Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair, and works by Michelangelo and Fra Angelico. The French government, in addition to installations of entire period rooms and loans of paintings to the fairs proper, had sent over René Huyghe, curator of paintings at the Louvre, with a large travelling exhibition entitled “From David to Lautrec.” Huyghe was in Buenos Aires with the show when war was declared. He rushed back to France, leaving the exhibition in the care of an assistant who managed to return it to the United States.4

  This and several other groups of stranded treasures from the two expositions would spend the war years in America, at first travelling from one museum to another, often in aid of war-effort fund-raising, and later in various storage depots. They were an unexpected windfall for American museums. When at one point the Italian, French, and Dutch representations, along with a rarely loaned pair of works by Hogarth and Constable from London’s National Gallery, were being shown in Chicago and Detroit simultaneously, critics noted that it was “the greatest opportunity the Middle West had ever had to study some of the highest attainments in the history of art.”5 Few museum directors, especially the less established ones, could resist taking advantage of such an opportunity. The Italian collection next appeared, somewhat out of context, at the Museum of Modern Art. In a spread which took up most of the ArtNews, Alfred Frankfurter commented on the “shrewd, nimble, publicity-consciousness of the MoMA in grasping an opportunity which its larger sister institution [the Met] had clumsily let slip.”6

  The situation had not only brought American cities enjoyable Old Master shows. From 1937 on there had been small exhibitions of Germany’s banished art and artists. The advent of war in 1939 brought these into the spotlight. In the show which opened MoMA’s new building were five purged works, all bought as Barr had wished, through Buchholz. The Art-News felt that the acquisitions gave “the strongest condemnation to the policies which barred these.”7 President Roosevelt, who spoke at the opening, said that “the arts cannot thrive except when men are free to be themselves.”8 Boston’s fledgling Institute of Contemporary Art, directed by James Plaut, put on a German modern show with loans from refugee dealers Valentin, Nierendorf, and Otto Kallir. The pictures themselves were not popular, but Plaut saw them as “terrible pictures, which are the more terrible for their intensity as a dread warning to civilized man.”9 Little did he know that he would soon be responsible for investigating the most intimate details of the art dealings of the Nazi leaders.

  The international art trade which in the mid-thirties had begun to show markedly improved activity was also affected by Hitler’s programs. Within Germany adjustments were made to deal with the new rules governing aesthetics and race. Jews working for some firms moved to branch offices in New York, Paris, or Amsterdam. Other businesses sold their names and assets to gentiles, a process called Aryanization. At first this was voluntary. In 1936 Franz Drey, owner of the well-established Munich firm of A. S. Drey, decided to move to the United States for the duration and asked Walter Bornheim, an “Aryan” dealer, to take over his establishment. Bornheim paid some RM 30,000 for the firm and also took over its stock, valued at RM 300,000. He was to pay this amount back after five years at the rate of RM 50,000 a year. He also agreed to hold certain works, which were considered German national treasures and could not be exported, until the situation changed and the Dreys could return and resume business as usual. The German government approved the transaction and the Drey family left for New York with the stock and assets it had been allowed to take out.10

  Numbers of others followed their example, a migration of dealers and collectors that brought a flood of art works to the market. In order to pay off debts and satisfy government-required exit fees, families sold objects which in normal times they would never have let go. The ban on the exportation of cash led many others to invest in works of art and other valuables which, until 1939, could be taken out as personal property. It also soon became clear that many in the Nazi leadership had a penchant for works of art. Robert von Hirsch, taking advantage of this trend, managed to get permission to take his great collection to Switzerland by bribing Goering with a work by Cranach. Within Germany a new market was thus created, virtually overnight, and a group of dealers,
not previously considered to be in the top rank, rushed to fill the gaps left by the departure of their Jewish colleagues and to take full advantage of it. The art trade was headed for a boom.

  Hitler, the artist manqué, had been collecting for some years in a very modest way. His first adviser was his old friend Heinrich Hoffmann. By 1936 Hoffmann had made a fortune from his monopoly on all photographs of Nazi proceedings, which were eagerly sought after by the foreign media, and through his art magazine, Kunst dem Volk, required on the coffee tables of the faithful. Later he increased his income further by obtaining exclusive rights to royalties on the postcards sold at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, of which he had become director. Hoffmann knew virtually nothing about art, but Hitler enjoyed their dealings and encouraged the photographer to seek out available works of his favorite nineteenth-century genre school.

  This was not a task Hoffmann could tackle alone and he soon enlisted the help of other dealers. The first was Maria Almas-Dietrich, a lady with whom he reportedly had had a longtime liaison, whose daughter was a friend of Eva Braun’s. Frau Dietrich ran a small shop in Munich specializing in rug repair and second-rate objets d’art, including plenty of the sentimental scenes admired by Hitler. Her “eye” was, if anything, worse than Hoffmann’s, but what she lacked in talent she made up for in sheer aggressiveness. One source stated that “she was the equal of five men.”